Aural Sex
10/24/04 (#43)
I'm in love again.
His name is Mike. We used to see each other a lot, but a few years ago, circumstances took us down different paths. I still thought of him now and then, but I had conveniently forgotten the spell he cast over me last time we got together. Today, he quietly sang a little melody into my ears, and 1 minutes 59 seconds later I felt that familiar stirring in those regions that live just to stir. 2 minutes with a guitar, a pipe organ (a most unusual instrument of seduction), and Mike's three-part harmony and all of the other music I owned suddenly seemed irrelevant.
I should have known better than to trust myself to get close to him again. The Mike in question is Mike Doughty, former front man for Soul Coughing, quite possibly my generation's most underrated band, and as many of you know, he possesses unexpected, even inexplicable charms. I first heard his voice in 1995 when this nasally post-modern troubador explained, "The teenagers were aesthetically pleasing / in other words, fly". My affection intensified with the release of "Irresistible Bliss" in 1996, an album so rife with gangly funk and delicious lyrical bon mots that it could easily be mistaken for a greatest hits compilation, with Doughty tossing off gems like "a body like soft serve, dripping down in the June sun" and "Some kind of verb/Some kind of moving thing". El Oso followed in 1998, and while the album is exceptional, there is an inexplicable resignation to the mood, the chefs once famous for daring improvisation were now obediently following the recipes.
When Soul Coughing parted ways, Mike and I did, too. Soul Coughing discs continued to get regular rotation in my house, but I stopped keeping tabs on the players. Now and then I would here a rumor---"Doughty's new album is techno", or "I heard his solo release, and it's no Soul Coughing"---but by then I had relapsed into my headphone affairs with PJ Harvey and Anthony Kiedis so I never bothered to check it out. A Doughty solo album seemed like a Mick Jagger solo album---not so much a question of good versus bad, but a question of, "Why, when you have a band that can so fully realize your songs, would your ego instruct you to go 'solo'?" (In the case of Jagger and his ridiculous solo outings, might that question perhaps be best answered with, "Because I needed a tax write off"?)("Let's work", including the lyrical couplet "Let's work/take off that shirt", is a stink-bomb almost powerful enough to irrevocably ruin the fine fragrance that wafts from inside the Exile on Main Street record jacket.)(Of course, in some cases, that smell is due to the fact that Exile's double-album fold-out makes a convenient laptop for rolling joints on the couch.)(Yet another positive lost to the world of the digital CD.)
But my pal Johnny Hollywood sent me to Mike's Website to investigate the great web graphics and interactive fun (the site offers a paint-by-number portrait that you actually get to color, a great collection of photography, all sorts of creative randomness.) I poked around the page, clicking this link and that, paying no mind to the fact that I was stumbling toward the audio jukebox. Like a recovering addict who unknowingly sprinkles smack on his breakfast cereal, I did not realize the significance of clicking "Download MP3". As a result of my careless click, I have listened to nothing else all day, and I see no need to. 2 minutes of minimalism---three voices and two instruments---that contains everything required to make me musically happy. 2 minutes of pop bliss, each replay offering a miniature vacation from everything except the percussive guitar strum, the simple three-part lullaby, and that simple, eloquent chorus:
You were the only answer
My plans spun all around you
Five years in the wrong, I am assured
My name, to you, is just another word
I have spent most of my life in perpetual pursuit of the perfect pop song* du jour. These have included Neil Young's "Everybody Knows this is Nowhere"; The Beatles' "Martha My Dear"; Billy Bragg's "A New England"; The Replacements' "Answering Machine"; David Garza's "Discoball World"; Prince's "When you were mine" (or "Electric Chair", or "Anastasia"); Elliott Smith's "Baby Britain"; The Tragically Hip's "Bobcaygeon". It's a list too long for this space, but suffice to say it's still a happy day when a song is added to the ranks. As the folks at Billboard might say, "The Only Answer" debuted today---with a bullet.
I read an essay a few years back by a writer who pondered his musical diet of The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Joy Division, and wondered, "Did pop music make me gloomy, or was I gloomy and so I gravitated to pop music?" This chicken and the egg question is worthy of pondering, as I noticed after making the short list above that each of these songs offers equal doses of lyrical hope and frustration, warmth and sadness, at times simultaneously. I wonder why all of my quickly-recalled favorite melodies have melancholy lyrics---am I that chicken, or am I that egg? Or is it simply that the melancholy subject helps to temper the sugary melody? After all, Katrina and The Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" is undoubtedly catchy, but its vacuous content precludes it from inclusion on my compilation of pop-rock masterpieces. (That, and it's annoyingly bubbly.)
Speaking of content, back in the 90's my friend Irene once coldly (yet quite accurately) described my music as having as its subject matter, "boy-girl shit." I listen back to much of that earlier work, and I am embarrassed by the confessional tone of the lyrics, songwriting-as-catharsis on full display. (In short, boy-girl shit.) In the 2000's, I consciously moved away from that type of subject matter, turned on to the metaphoric possibilities of science and astronomy by my pals in Merrick Foundation. (While it may be hard to hear the words at the shows, Steve Davis is a fabulous lyricist.) Soon I was writing songs about orbiting satellites, algebraic equations and rapidly expanding nebulae. (I learned that plural form when researching the lyrics.)
Most of which are really metaphors for more boy-girl shit. I have shifted away from autobiography and toward third-person narratives, but it doesn't take a grad student to deduce that if one thinks of a person having "satellites", then any mention of shaky telemetry or waxing trajectory could be examined on more than one level. Mike Doughty did a similar thing with Soul Coughing's "Irresistible Bliss", once describing the lyrics on the album as "love-songs expressed as mathematical equations." This metaphoric technique is hardly original or profound, but it remains a useful exercise in finding a unique presentation of a universal experience, a genuine expression of an insight.
I often feel a need to apologize for liking pop music. I hang with a crowd that likes its confections with sharp, crispy edges, unconcerned if there is nougat center. But today, I am once again coming out of the saccharine closet: give me a strong melody and I'll give you enough time to make the rest of your case; give me a three-part harmony and I promise to listen to what you have to say. Otherwise, I'm going to sneak out early so I can enjoy a long ride home with Mike--- it's all new and fresh between us again, and I am savoring this period of reacquaintance. With apologies to Winnie the Pooh, listening to a perfect pop song is delightful, but on days like these, there is an even better moment---that split second of giddy enthusiasm that one feels as their finger travels toward the play button, knowing the joy that is about to unfold.
©2004 wpreagan
*Pop, to me, is defined not by Celine Dion and P. Diddy (that's Top-40), but by Cheap Trick and The Roots (that's pop.)(That's right, in my book, The Roots are pop---thick, stealthy, intelligent pop.)
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